Terrorism: Theirs and ours

A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder by Eqbal
Ahmad, 12 October 1998

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was
described as “TERRORIST.” Then new things happened.

By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy
with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that
point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly
started to be described, by 1944-45, as “freedom
fighters.” At least two Israeli Prime Ministers, including
Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the books and posters
with their pictures, saying “Terrorists, Reward This
Much.” The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000
British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat
has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American
journalism, William Safire of the New York Times, as the “Chief
of Terrorism.” That's Yasir Arafat.

Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of
Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards
Arafat and Arafat is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few
years earlier he used to appear with this very menacing look around
him, with a gun appearing menacing from his belt.

You remember those pictures, and you remember the next one.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men.
These bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker,
actually did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with
turbans looking like they came from another century. President Reagan
received them in the White House. After receiving them he spoke to
the press. He pointed towards them, I’m sure some of you will
recall that moment, and said, “These are the moral equivalent of
America's founding fathers”. These were the Afghan
Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil
Empire. They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers!

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes
from the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin
Laden and his men in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to
embarrass you with the reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen
American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few
years ago the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he has been demoted from
’Moral Equivalent’ of your ‘Founding
Fathers'. So he is taking out his anger in different
ways. I’ll come back to that subject more seriously in a moment.

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you
that the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change.
The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of
yesterday becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of
the constantly changing world of images in which we have to keep our
heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is not. But more
importantly, to know what causes it, and how to stop it.

The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency
necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent,
you’re not going to define. I have examined at least twenty
official documents on terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of
them explain it, express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our
emotions rather than exercise our intelligence. I give you only one
example, which is representative. October 25, 1984. George Shultz,
then Secretary of State of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park
Avenue Synagogue. It's a long speech on terrorism. In the State
Department Bulletin of seven single-spaced pages, there is not a
single definition of terrorism. What we get is the following:

Definition number one: “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we
call terrorism.”

Definition number two is even more brilliant: “Terrorism is a
form of political violence.” Aren’t you surprised? It is a
form of political violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of
the U.S.

Number three: “Terrorism is a threat to Western
civilization.”

Number four: “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral
values.”

Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your
emotions?

This is typical. They don’t define terrorism because definitions
involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some
norms of consistency. That's the second characteristic of the
official literature on terrorism.

The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not
prevent officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism,
but it is a menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is
a menace also to mankind. It's a menace to good order. Therefore,
you must stamp it out worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need
a global reach to kill it. Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to
be global. Same speech of George Shultz: “There is no question
about our ability to use force where and when it is needed to counter
terrorism.” There is no geographical limit. On a single day the
missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 2,300
miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging to a country
roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they
are also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where
to hit. We have the means to know. We have the instruments of
knowledge. We are omniscient. Shultz: “We know the difference
between terrorists and freedom fighters, and as we look around, we
have no trouble telling one from the other.”

Only Osama Bin Laden doesn’t know that he was an ally one day
and an enemy another. That's very confusing for Osama Bin
Laden. I’ll come back to his story towards the end. It's a
real story.

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don’t look at
causes of anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us
to be looking, to be sympathetic to these people.

Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that
the foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you remember the days when there
was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of State of the U.S. to
consider the causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State,
George Shultz, and I am quoting from the New York Times, “went a
bit red in the face. He pounded the table and told the visiting
foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause.
Period.” Why look for causes?

Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is
selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are
officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups
of whom officials do approve. Hence, President Reagan, “I am a
contra.” He actually said that. We know the contras of
Nicaragua were anything, by any definition, but terrorists. The media,
to move away from the officials, heed the dominant view of terrorism.

The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more
importantly to me, the terror of friendly governments. To that
question I will return because it excused among others the terror of
Pinochet (who killed one of my closest friends) and Orlando Letelier;
and it excused the terror of Zia ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends
in Pakistan. All I want to tell you is that according to my ignorant
calculations, the ratio of people killed by the state terror of Zia
ul-Haq, Pinochet, Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian type, versus the
killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is literally,
conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That's the ratio.

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and
not to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically
to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with this day,
Columbus Day.

The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary
unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The
Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian
Indians were all wiped out. Their voices have not been heard, even to
this day fully. Now they are beginning to be heard, but not
fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the dominant power suffers,
only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of exacting a
price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is
besieged. That's when you know that they were Indians fighting,
Arabs fighting and dying.

My last point of this section—U.S. policy in the Cold War period
has sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista,
all kinds of tyrants have been America's friends. You know
that. There was a reason for that. I or you are not
guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.

Now the second side. You’ve suffered enough. So suffer more.

There ain’t much good on the other side either. You
shouldn’t imagine that I have come to praise the other side. But
keep the balance in mind. Keep the imbalance in mind and first ask
ourselves, What is terrorism?

Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a
description of some kind, other than “moral equivalent of
founding fathers” or “a moral outrage to Western
civilization”. I will stay with you with Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary: “Terror is an intense, overpowering
fear.” He uses terrorizing, terrorism, “the use of
terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.”
This simple definition has one great virtue, that of
fairness. It's fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence,
violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to
coerce. And this definition is correct because it treats terror for
what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We’re
not talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We’re
talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality,
absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of
constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ.
Motives differ and make no difference.

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.

First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism
inspired by religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing
Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can
call it if you wish. State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of
crimes commit terror. There is pathology. You’re
pathological. You’re sick. You want the attention of the whole
world. You’ve got to kill a president. You will. You
terrorize. You hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the
private group; be they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian,
Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade. Political terror of the private
group. Oppositional terror.

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these
five can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go
crazy. You become pathological. You continue. They converge. State
terror can take the form of private terror. For example, we’re
all familiar with the death squads in Latin America or in
Pakistan. Government has employed private people to kill its
opponents. It's not quite official. It's
privatized. Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and
becomes pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In
Afghanistan, in Central America, the CIA employed in its covert
operations drug pushers. Drugs and guns often go together. Smuggling
of all things often go together.

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least
important in terms of cost to human lives and human property
[Political Terror of those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is
state terror. The second highest cost is religious terror, although in
the twentieth century religious terror has, relatively speaking,
declined. If you are looking historically, massive costs. The next
highest cost is crime. Next highest, pathology. A Rand Corporation
study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year period up to 1988, showed 50%
of terror was committed without any political cause at all. No
politics. Simply crime and pathology.

So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin
Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the
terrorist tick?

I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be
heard. Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political,
private terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there
are exceptions, there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances
heard by people. They’re not hearing it. A minority acts. The
majority applauds.

The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were
dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in
the world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told
that they became dispossessed because some radio told them to go
away—an Arab radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the
truth. Finally, they invented a new form of terror, literally their
invention: the airplane hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled
the world up by its ears. They dragged us out and said, Listen,
Listen. We listened. We still haven’t done them justice, but at
least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir,
Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970, ‘There are no
Palestinians.’ They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We
are cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat
now. We can’t just push them out. The need to be heard is
essential. One motivation there.

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are
angry. You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to
wreak retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger
party has historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered
children are known to become abusive parents and violent adults. You
know that. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they
are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective
terror.

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and
large Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the
Holocaust. Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst
terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun
gangs, were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic
countries of Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites
of Lebanon or the Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered
people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent internally.
They become violent externally when there is a clear, identifiable
external target, an enemy where you can say, ‘Yes, this one did
it to me’. Then they can strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized
Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were
hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological
groups or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are
examples set by governments. When governments engage in terror, they
set very large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they
engage in other sets of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism.
Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are
familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the
quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight
between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have
always argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be
sociologically and psychologically selective. Don’t hijack a
plane. Don’t hold hostages. Don’t kill children, for
God's sake. Have you recalled also that the great revolutions, the
Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in
hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in terrorism, but it was
highly selective, highly sociological, still deplorable, but there was
an organized, highly limited, selective character to it. So absence of
revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the post-World War
II period has been central to this phenomenon.

My final question is—These conditions have existed for a long
time. But why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now
so much of it and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You
have a cause. You can communicate it through radio and
television. They will all come swarming if you have taken an aircraft
and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will all hear your
cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a mile
away. They can’t reach you. And you have the modern means of
communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of
coercion and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new
kind of politics becomes possible.

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been
responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of
shooting it out, whether it's missiles or some other means. The
Israelis are very proud of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The
French became very proud of it. Now the Pakistanis are very proud of
it. The Pakistanis say, ‘Our commandos are the best.’
Frankly, it won’t work. A central problem of our time, political
minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new
realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to
America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you’re
going to practice double standards, you will be paid with double
standards. Don’t use it. Don’t condone Israeli terror,
Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on the one
hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It
doesn’t work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot promote
terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in
another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them.
Punish them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity
warfare. These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and
drugs are bred there. The structure of covert operations, I’ve
made a film about it, which has been very popular in Europe, called
Dealing with the Demon. I have shown that wherever covert operations
have been, there has been the central drug problem. That has been
also the center of the drug trade. Because the structure of covert
operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very
hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn’t help.

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at
causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military
solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political
problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.

Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don’t know
what you’re attacking. They say they know, but they don’t
know. They were trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old
daughter. The poor baby hadn’t done anything. Qadaffi is still
alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They killed Laila Bin Attar,
a prominent artist, an innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden
and his men. Not one but twenty-five other people died. They tried to
destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that they
destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine
in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. You don’t
know. You think you know.

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two
were totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the
American government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan
is trying, stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have
a technology embargo on my country. One of the missiles was
intact. What do you think a Pakistani official told the Washington
Post? He said it was a gift from Allah. We wanted U.S.
technology. Now we have got the technology, and our scientists are
examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the wrong
hands. So don’t do that. Look for political solutions. Do not
look for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international
law. There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn’t they go to
it first to get their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some
evidence? Get a warrant, then go after him. Internationally. Enforce
the U.N. Enforce the International Court of Justice, this
unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them relatively smaller.

Q&A

The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into
the story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn’t do
so, could I go into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be
roughly the same as the point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was
accused and convicted of encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade
Center in New York City. The New Yorker did a long story on
him. It's the same as that of Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani Baluch
who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. Let me see if
I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been translated a
thousand times as “holy war,” is not quite just
that. Jihad is an Arabic word that means, “to struggle.”
It could be struggle by violence or struggle by non-violent
means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big jihad. The
small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the struggles
with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is that in
Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had
disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical
purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the
1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq,
the military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw
an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism.
The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims
against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in.
CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people
to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize
recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not
only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own
money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the
jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American
official of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I
was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here who would
be very interesting?’ By here I meant in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went to see
Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from
Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an
ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990
the U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy
place of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign
troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name
of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden
remained quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on
in the land of the kaba (the sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign
troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get
out! You came to help but you have stayed on. Finally he started a
jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American
troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian
troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier about covert
operations?

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people
who are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn’t matter. Their
code of ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two
words: loyalty and revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I
am loyal to you. You break your word, I go on my path of revenge. For
him, America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The
one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you. They’re
going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more.

These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to
roost. This is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price
attached to those that the American people cannot calculate and
Kissinger type of people do not know, don’t have the history to
know.

Eqbal Ahmad, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle
Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, also
served as a managing editor of the quarterly Race and Class. A
prolific writer, his articles and essays have been published in The
Nation, Dawn (Pakistan), among several other journals throughout the
world. He died in 1999.